Cache Adance

One of the generous prizes donated for our 5th Anniversary Contest is a Cache Crate from one of the longest tenured Geocaching retailers in the world, Cache-Advance. What exactly is a Cache Crate? It could be described as a membership based service where you receive a surprise box full of Geocaching and outdoor gear delivered to your house. Cache-Advance themselves describe it as “just like finding an awesome regular sized cache filled with amazing swag”.

Membership Levels:

Cache Crates ship out on a monthly basis, although they do offer some memberships where you don’t receive them every single month. There are 6 levels of membership:

3 Month gift membership for $60 ($20/month)

Annual membership for $228 ($19/month)

6 Month membership for $120 ($20/month)

Monthly membership ($22/month)

Every other month membership ($23/every other month)

Quarterly membership (a Cache Crate every 3rd month) ($24/month)

Cache Crate unboxing gone viral on YouTube:

A Google search of “cache crate unboxing” shows at least 4 Geocaching Vloggers have made videos of them opening up a Cache Crate. Here we have the June 2015 unboxing by one time OCNA guest blogger The Geocaching Doc. This is the same video shown on the Cache Crate Membership page on Cache-Advance’s website. Do check that out, and consider buying a membership for yourself or a gift membership for someone else. We thank Lisa from Cache-Advance for the donation for our contest.

P.S. What happened to The Geocaching Doc on this blog?

Oh, about 3 months ago, YouTube forced developers to migrate to the latest version of their API. You might remember in 2014 a similar directive issued by Google Maps threw ours (as well as fellow alternative site Terracaching.com’s) cache maps into a tizzy. Both have since been fixed. The plug in that posted The GCDoc’s latest video on this blog was not compliant. We did hear of a small coding fix, and it worked for about a month, then abruptly stopped working again. We are looking at other plug in options, and are confident we can come up with something.

The OCNA blog is about 9 months old now, and we have conducted several interviews; 22, to be exact. Many of those interviewees provide a Geocaching related product or service, and it didn’t take us long to realize that many of them are often developing new products or services, or making “improvements” to existing ones. This is certainly the case with Dan Hundycz, President of DPH Games, maker of The Cache Me If You Can! Geocaching board game. The game was featured in a June 2013 post on this blog. We noticed via ads run on Geocaching.com that the Zombie Apocalypse expansion pack (also known as Zombie Apocalypse Geocaching, or ZAG) was released October 25th, 2013 (just in time for Halloween). We noticed as well that DPH games has greatly increased their visibility, with 14 vendors now selling the game. So we decided to “Cache up” with Dan.

Zombie Apocalypse Expansion Pack

Now if you think there has never been a connection between Zombies and Geocaching before, you’d be wrong. We have seen several Geocaching events combined with the social phenomenon of Zombie Walks. Sure, they’re not as big as Geocaching Flash Mobs yet, but you never know. Dan tells us of the ZAG “Earlier this year, I wasn’t sure how it would be received by the Geocaching community. Our first order sold out with pre-sales. The concept resonated with geocachers.” As is stated on the ZAG page on the DPH Games website, “The Zombie Apocalypse has begun! Fortunately, YOU have your priorities straight. What could be more important? It’s time to grab your shotgun and go out Geocaching!” Says Dan of that humorous statement, “The response from Cachers is, of course I would continue Geocaching!”Dan went on to briefly describe the ZAG, saying “The Zombie expansion pack adds a number of wild twists to the original game. You can even become a geocaching Zombie (and win if you are the best geocaching Zombie at the end of the game).” The ZAG was actually announced on the DPH Games website long before it’s release, and there are currently two other expansion packs mentioned on the site. Dan tells us “The next expansion pack is in the Beta testing phase and due out sometime in the late spring. It’s called Superhero Geocaching (Link to page on Dan’s website). An evil doctor and his thugs (called Thuggles) are going to destroy all of the caches in the world. Captain Cache and his superhero friends are trying to stop him.” We’d like to personally thank Dan for calling them Thuggles, and not Thugglers! He also noted “All of the expansion packs will work with all of the other packs. So, if one were crazy enough, they could play Superhero, Zombie Apocalypse Geocaching!” Additionally, according to Dan “There are plans for a regular expansion pack that adds another board (Back into the Woods), but that won’t likely be out until next fall.”We might add, Cache Me If You Can! will not be DPH Games’ only game endeavor. Dan says “Our next game is Psychological Warfare. It’s a strategic card game that has nothing to do with Geocaching.” You can read all about that, and see some sample cards on the Psychological Warfare page on the DPH Games website, sounds very interesting. We also mentioned we noticed DPH games has increased their visibilty, now with 14 Vendors selling the game, including Shop Groundspeak. Dan told us “Since we last spoke, Cache Me If You Can! has been picked up by Groundspeak’s store. Sales exceeded their expectation and they are on their third order.” Great to hear! You can also purchase the game online from previous interviewees, The Space Coast Geocaching store, and CacheAdvance. There is now a Canadian distributor, Cache At Night. You can see all 14 vendors on the where to buy page on the DPH Games website. And don’t forget, you still have time before Chistmas!
Thanks to Dan for letting us cache up with him! We will be catching up with some of the other past interviewees in the future. None of them will probably have a clever pun using the word cache instead of catch in their blog post though! Stay tuned.

The Geocachers’ Creed is designed to help orient new players to the ethos of the geocaching community and to guide experienced players in questionable situations, so that everyone can enjoy geocaching!

Above the grey line, is an excerpt from the Geocachers’ Creed website, the entire contents of which can be viewed at www.geocreed.info. The “examples” and other links do work, but they take you to the actual geocreed.info site, opened in a new window. Please do read the bulleted examples for each of the seven “tenets”, as they’re called; they are very important (although not part of the Creed itself), just too long to reproduce here in this post.